How do you separate your work life and your private life? - Early results of the UK Qualitative fieldwork on work / home boundaries
PROFIT’s fieldwork examines people’s work / home identities and the boundaries of work and home, and how technology is currently bridging these two domains. Unmet needs are a strong indicator for user satisfaction and requirements in this area.
The ambient intelligence vision PROFIT is investigating has some key underlying assumptions, which make work / home boundaries a critical issue. Devices are ‘always on’ and pervasive, running in the background of people’s lives. Always on, pervasive and particularly mobile devices challenge the boundaries of work and home, especially for those who wish to maintain a separation between these domains. PROFIT has therefore looked at people's current approaches to work and home - particularly whether they integrate or separate work and home and work/ home identities, and the role of existing ICTs and ICT services in this.
Two different target groups were recruited for the field work research - sole traders or small business owners and the employees of medium to large companies. It was postulated that these two groups may have very different work / home boundaries to be mediated by information and communication technologies:
Small businesses:
profit maximisers versus 'lifestyle' businesses
Early results from UK fieldwork revealed that the small business sample mostly displayed an extremely integrated approach to ‘work’ time and personal / home time.
For some, this is part of the reason for becoming a small business: home demands (such as shopping or household tasks) can be fitted in flexibly with working life, and integration is regarded positively. Work can even be carried out away from the desk, with mobile phones releasing small business owners from waiting in for calls and allowing them to work where they want.
However many small businesses operate an integrated approach to work and home out of sheer necessity - they have to be available at all times to answer any enquiries that come their way and therefore maximise their profits. Being always available is part of the service they provide, and is used to improve their reputation amongst customers.
But some small businesses are revealed not to be 'profit maximisers,' and instead are 'lifestyle' businesses. They operate their business to earn just a portion of their income and for quality of life reasons. ‘Lifestyle’ small businesses can and do operate strict boundaries between work and home, and often resent work intruding upon home more than profit maximisers.
The role of ICT services in mediating work / home boundaries for small businesses
The fixed phone is still the most important mediator of work and home and a source of intrusions for small businesses. Such intrusions are particularly acute for small businesses that quite literally work from home. Field research showed that such businesses are using caller ID systems and answering machines to screen calls, but they are still disturbed by the phone ringing. Mobile phone numbers are often given out for small businesses ‘on the move’ such as antique shop owners and builders, and intrusions here are from the public calling mobiles ‘out of hours.’ This situation is made worse by the fact that these are not work-specific phones, but shared between work and personal use - which means they cannot easily be ignored without missing personal calls.
The Internet and e-mail are revealed to be regarded as ‘another thing to deal with’ which impinges on home time. But e-mail inquiries can lessen the disturbance of phone calls, except where the 24/7 global nature of the Internet leads to out-of-hours phoning from people in different countries who have forgotten international time differences. But wireless access and wireless LANs are having a positive impact on small businesses who work from home - allowing escape from the home office and integration into the sociality of the house for home workers, where work can then be more sociable and enjoyable. A major problem for home workers is the lack of sociability they may experience without their work colleagues, and the wireless LAN may help redress this by allowing more interaction with others at home.
In terms of unmet user needs in the ICTs area, small businesses didn't generally articulate needs beyond immediate practical concerns including the need for IT training, a reliable mobile signal (especially when travelling), and the desire for Broadband. However, some voiced specific unmet needs for their own situations. One small business owner wanted unobtrusive data backup running in the background to protect his important data - he felt vulnerable without the infrastructure of a large business IT system. Another sole trader wanted the seamless transferability of Internet/ e-mail capabilities to a robust and usable mobile device. This would allow the sending of e-mails from a workshop location as each job was completed - so this did not have to be done in the evening and cut into non-work time.
Corporate employees' work / home boundaries are highly variable depending on the work they do, the work culture they are part of and their own internalised philosophies about work and home. But they generally do have a greater scope to separate work and home if their occupation allows and their work culture permits. However, ICTs are placing pressure to integrate work and home. And while some regard this negatively, it also has extremely positive elements. There are additionally existing coping mechanisms for the negative elements – which perhaps could be improved by AmI devices.
The role of ICT services in mediating work / home boundaries for employees
It has become easier to work from home or be a full-time teleworker, especially if employees have remote access to servers and e-mail. It has also become possible to blur work and leisure boundaries with ICTs – mobile phones and wireless LANs allow work in more comfortable, less stressful environments such as in the garden or the living room. But the increasing prevalence of work-related mobile phones, which employees take home, make employees potentially accessible and open to being disturbed at all times. Employees can also work while travelling with access to the Internet, and remain in constant contact with their company. However, travel time remains a 'space between' - is it work or leisure time?
Another important development concerning employees' work/ home boundary issues relates to Internet access at work. It becomes possible to do home-related things at work such as shopping or searching for information about non-work things.
One
of the most negative aspects of ICTs and how they cross work / home boundaries
is being disturbed out of working hours. This can happen with the fixed phone,
but the presence of a work-related mobile phone may greater legitimate
disturbing an employee during non-work time. Having out of hours access at
home also makes it tempting to log on during days off or on days dedicated to
other work tasks. Logging on then creates a trail of work, which has to be
dealt with immediately - meaning work carries over into non-work time and
internalised work boundaries are hard to maintain. There do exist coping
mechanisms for these negative elements, but they are extremely ‘low tech’.
These include placing insurmountable barriers to stop yourself using remote
access such as using an old laptop without Internet access at home, or turning
off the mobile phone.
The sample of employees again showed, as with the small businesses, that ICTs allowed a better management of work / life balance issues. Working at home, as enabled by ICTs for some occupations, enabled more flexibility in doing home-related tasks and a better-perceived quality of life. Access to the Internet at work also allows employees to carry out ‘home’ things at work (such as Internet banking) and blur work and leisure boundaries. While this may seem a 'waste' of work time, being able to deal with pressing and worrying non-work issues was said by employees to be necessary for effective working. There was also a seamless movement between looking at issues of non-work interest and thinking about work concerns, especially for those working in research and creative industries - with non-work searching and looking sparking ideas for work.
As with small businesses, employees' articulated unmet needs mostly involved improving existing services such as getting faster, more reliable connections. Additionally, the home workers interviewed often did not have all the equipment they needed to do everything at home, such as printing. Some of the data does point to specific unmet needs, e.g. being able to seamlessly use light, portable and usable computers with Internet access in 'marginal' spaces, which are outside the computing sphere of the home office or work place (such as when out investigating cases in the field for a social worker). This mirrors the comments by some of the small businesses, articulating the need for computers that are easy to use 'on the job.'
Some needs remain unarticulated - such as having better ways of dealing with the negative elements of ICTs in crossing boundaries. This could include having different levels of availability on mobile phones – so in emergencies people are ‘always reachable,’ but with gradations of availability down from this. There could also be the easier separation of work-related e-mails into priorities, and a choice to open an e-mail application so that only the highest priority messages show.